As Britain’s top independent forecaster (a skeptic) again outwits his global warming adversaries in weather prediction, we examine what really seperates the men from the boys in this hot topic.
Award winning maverick forecaster, Piers Corbyn’s unparalled success in outperforming his rivals (global warming believers) is winning him deserved column inches in the British press. The man who, in 2010 predicted a trio of major rare events (Pakistan floods, Moscow heatwave, Britain’s brutal winter) gives us a rare glimpse into why he’s so successful, to the great embarrassment of his main rivals, the Met Office.
The simple truth is no mystery. Corbyn doesn’t rely on what he refers to as “junk computer models” that he claims are routinely fed highly spurious temperature data. But more pointedly, the sage astrophysicist insists the vital ingredient in his method is adding to the mix solar and lunar variability, which conventional climatologists dismiss as being of less importance than human emissions of carbon dioxide. Corbyn raises a wry smile at the mention of the phrase ‘greenhouse gases.’ "More junk science!" He recommends a more compelling analysis of that theory here.
As the 63-year-old attests, while his predictions are so eerily accurate and his rivals so wantonly askew, can we now deduce there is a fundamental flaw in his rivals’ methodology? Let’s look closer at the science.
Skeptics Argue Poor Temperature Data Records Skew Analyses
Critics of government-funded climate research have long argued that one of the most insidious acts in recent decades has been the wanton culling of global weather stations maintaining real world thermometer readings.
As reported by ‘A Sceptical Mind,’
“In the last 25 years there has been an accelerating reduction in thermometer counts globally with the pace of deletion rising rapidly in recent years. Over 6000 stations were active in the mid-1990s. Just over 1000 are in use today.”
Many of the ‘lost’ thermometers were (and still are) located in Polar Regions. For example, Canada has 100 perfectly usable weather stations inside the Arctic Circle-but only one at Eureka on Ellesmere Island – is used by government-funded climatologists.
So why does this matter? Critics have long pointed out that fewer data collection centers means less reliable data. They argue the ulterior motive for climatologists dropping thousands of perfectly serviceable thermometers is to allow computer modelers a freer hand to ‘interpolate’ their own synthetic data e.g. fill the gaps with their own ‘confirmation bias.’ Some of us would call that fraud.
The ‘Bolivia Effect’ Warms our new SIM Planet
The confirmation bias of climate modelers also skews the data for weather forecasters, as succinctly shown by E.M Smith who calls this the ‘Bolivia Effect.’ Smith tells us that, “There has not been any thermometer data for Bolivia in GHCN since 1990.”
Why is that significant? Well, Bolivia is one of the 5,000 ‘cooler’ weather stations that climatologists have conveniently dumped from the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN).
Remember Al Gore’s ‘Canary in the Coal Mine’?
Noted climate alarmist, Al Gore once famously asked that we look to the Artic for the ‘canary in the coal mine’ of climatic change. How convenient for Al when the Artic has been virtually stripped of thermometers.
Are we seriously to believe that despite over $80 billion being spent to date on climate research the budget has no room to maintain ‘cooler’ global thermometers? Aren’t weather forecasters entitled to be given a clearer picture of actual shifts in global weather patterns more reliable than what Climategate investigator Lord Oxburgh determined as “subjective” climate data?
This thermometer cull is especially worrisome when we learn that U.S. climate scientists as GISS delete Sea Surface Temperature data from the Arctic Ocean, and a third of data from Antarctica. Now polar temperatures have to be based on thermometers 1,200km away!
Thus it’s little wonder that during yet another brutal winter’s icy blast NASA and their fellow alphabet gravy train riders can trumpet 2000-2010 as the “hottest decade” in recorded history.
Tired of ‘Warming Causes Cooling’ Claims
But not to be outdone by revelations of their statistical shenanigans, climate doomsayers are now resorting to dismissing Corbyn and Co. for daring to suggest a recent crop of cold winters is the harbinger of a new mini ice age.
“Warming causes cooling, too” according to the disjointed thinking of those folks at realclimate.org, the hub of doomsaying lore and who have been chopping and changing their take on this issue for years. However, anyone who has read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports will know that nowhere in their literature do they claim any such long-term effect.
Reliance on Computer Simulations Led to Faulty Forecasting
Like other skeptics Corbyn, who runs London-based WeatherAction, believes a doomsaying clique intentionally worsened the problem by encouraging climate modelers worldwide to trust ‘official’ data. Thus, even honest scientists and weather forecasters become the inadvertent ‘useful idiots’ of the scam as they blithely load their own computers with pure warmist “GIGO”- or ‘garbage in, garbage out.”
What has saved Corbyn from the taint of this GIGO mass epidemic is that he has had the great foresight, nay, genius, the stick to the traditional scientific method and not touch GHCN’s nefarious numbers.
While the duped and the doomsayers at the UK’s Met Office have been erring time and again predicting warmer temperatures, the maverick 63-year-old astrophysicist has been making detailed and precise calibrations from the sun and moon coupled with further data analysis of past temperature records ( not junk ‘homogenized’ variants from GHCN, NASA GISS, HadCrut, NOAA, etc).
Despite being mocked by the alphabet soup brigade riding their governmental gravy trains, WeatherAction has risen from within the private sector and can no longer be ignored by the mainstream press. Corbyn’s telling warning of “ the worst winters for 100 years” was extensively reported across the blogosphere as were his Pakistan flood and Moscow heatwave forecasts.
Corbyn, the Man who came in From the Cold
A bemused Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, warmly praised Corbyn in the Daily Telegraph (December 22, 2010).
In these cold, harsh recession-hit commercial times Mayor Johnson is attuned to the fact Britain can afford no room for expensive government failures. The 46-year-old who has never seen a winter like this one berated the Met Office, which, despite being taxpayer funded to the tune of hundreds of millions, is year after year being out-predicted by Corbyn.
In 2009 more than 25,000 people died in England and Wales as a result of the nation’s coldest temperatures since 1978. This year that gruesome tally is sure to be exceeded as Britain is yet again caught out and ill prepared for another brutally cold winter.
Johnson, close to Westminster’s corridors of power, has helped usher in the one man who really ought to be brought in from the cold. Other media outlets take note.
But Corbyn’s successes are no surprise to most skeptics. Bookmakers haven’t been taking weather bets off him for years and Dr Dennis Wheeler of the University of Sunderland justified the “85 percent success rate” claim with a peer-reviewed paper.
Some argue if the British government were truly concerned about giving taxpayers better value for money they’d appoint Corbyn as head of the Met Office. But pigs aren’t yet learning to fly in London.
Confirmation Bias Persists Among Government Agencies
UK taxpayers still suffer, as most major media outlets remain wedded to the global warming doomsaying and any and all confirmation bias fitting their mindset. The current annual tax bill to ‘fight’ Britain’s global warming is set at £18 billion thanks to politicians unanimously voting in the Climate Change Act (2008). This is a pattern of mass delusion well known to psychologists.
Those afflicted with this malaise are possessed by what is termed ‘attitude polarization;’ they become intently focused on only one possibility and ignore all other alternatives.
As a further case in point, this year’s Moscow heatwave was widely trumpeted in the press as proof of global warming. However, those same media outlets are studiously ignoring the current predicament of an icebound Russia where experts are anticipating the coldest winter in 1,000 years.
Interpolated ‘Guessed’ Artic Temperatures Skew Weather Forecasts
Corbyn like other skeptics, can outdo Al Gore’s ‘canary’ and it’s the world’s most accurate scientific barometer of climate change; the 351-year-old Central England Temperatures [CET]). Scientist and non-scientist alike can peer into this ‘coal mine’ and see not one shred of evidence for man-made global warming.
This much-ignored yet century’s-long gentle line of temperatures most evidently exposes the establishment’s doomsaying confirmation bias. When scientists (and their government and media buddies) use facts so selectively, and interpret them in a biased way we know they are no longer honest messengers but advocates of an ideology.
Finally, for those possessed of a more open mind and who scorn the aforesaid propaganda, here’s another severe weather warning from Piers (ignore at your peril):
‘WeatherAction World RED WARNING for extreme weather 25-31 Dec’
“WeatherAction forecasted weeks ahead that there will be many dangerous weather events around the world in the period 25-31 Dec and specified a triple whammy of extreme events for Britain/NW Europe, NE/E USA and South/East Queensland Australia.”
Don’t say we didn’t tell you.
Reference:
Dr. Wheeler, D., "A verification of UK gale forecasts by the `solar weather technique’: October 1995-September 1997." Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Vol 63 (2001) p29-34
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